Hide and Seek

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If it's true that in children's books we want to shield
readers from the world's real or imagined dangers, then it is
equally so that as adults we remain highly susceptible to stories
of children in peril.

Hide and Seek might be for adults, it might be for
teenagers, it's probably not for children. Let's call it a
crossover novel. That way we can avoid the need to label
prescriptively. The debut novel has even been compared to The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Hide and
Seek, though outwardly less flamboyant, equally creates a young
male voice that is nuanced and emotionally engaging.

It depicts perhaps the worst thing that a family might ever
endure.

Nine-year-old Harry Pickles narrates the story. Dan, or Dan-Dan
as he is affectionately known, is Harry's completely adorable
five-year-old brother. Harry dishes up the kind of casual violence
that only big brothers can: poking at Dan's fontanel at birth, idly
whacking Dan's head against walls, sitting on Dan and farting
loudly on his head. Dan is young enough to still have an invisible
friend, Biffo.

The boys live happily, comfortably, but not grandly with their
liberal parents Pa and Mo, just off Portobello Road in perfectly
groovy Notting Hill. Mo writes a column for The Guardian
called "Me and My Boys", Pa is a medical specialist. All fine,
until Harry and Dan go on a school outing to Legoland and only
Harry returns.

Imagine the family portrait retouched by Paula Rego, intimate
realism hemmed by nightmarish shadows. Hide and Seek catches
Harry's voice with impressively precise prose, mixing vulnerability
and dread with a world-weariness that would make Nick Hornby
smile.

Also working into the picture is Joan and her Jamaican husband
Otis. It is courtesy of Dan that Otis appears, when Dan's head is
stuck in a playground fence at Holland Park. Otis is the book's one
true hero, like Hardy's Gabriel Oak, a force for good amid the
wreckage around him. With the disappearance of Dan goes the
family's equilibrium. We witness this upside-down world through
Harry's eyes, feel it through his skin. The detail of Dan's
disappearance is withheld; this is not a whodunit.

Somehow Mo tries to remain positive. Like New Labour, Mo's chant
is "things will get better", except they don't. This phrase also
attaches to the bus driver, whom Harry comes to believe may be
responsible for Dan's disappearance. With the once-secure family in
chaos, Harry goes looking for answers and finds them in Terry, a
spoiled rich kid driven by SAS-fuelled power fantasies. Sambrook
evokes a kind of Lord of the Flies in Holland Park as Terry
goads Harry to take revenge for Dan upon a hapless gardener. In
Harry's mind, these images mix in a nasty cocktail.

This is frightening enough, but it is in Mo where the terror
most truly takes root. Harry observes Mo, "her voice as flat as
ironing, her Irish ups and downs pressed out". Her breakdown is
both physical and psychological, and is painful to endure.

But Harry does so from very close range: the mouldy bread, food
rotting in the fridge, the filth of the house now that Pa has left.
Mo embraces a painfully destructive fantasy life of her own,
anything to fill the void. So here is our vulnerability exposed,
our fear in the face of the child in peril.

In this, there are echoes of Ian McEwan's A Child in
Time, but Hide and Seek touches lightly on a number of
reference points. It wears its politics lightly too, so that the
effect is both a complex and detailed interior life and a social
world that scarcely cares to notice the damage.

Mike Shuttleworth is program co-ordinator for the Centre
for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria.